Talk about being in the right place at the right time. With today being the day that America begins putting its New Year’s resolutions into practice and also the morning after both houses of Congress passed a bill to avoid something called a “fiscal cliff,” intelligent student loan management startup Tuition.io is opening its doors to the public for the first time. For good measure, the company is also announcing several flagship partners that will put it squarely in the path of its target audience.

The one year old company incubated in Santa Monica’s LaunchpadLA accelerator has put the wraps on a four month, 1,500 person private beta in which its systems managed more than $100 million in education debt across over 10,000 individual student loans, and originating from 130 universities – including the nation’s Top 25. Throughout its beta period, the company gathered user input and subsequently refined the product, with the result being an entirely new UI and dashboard rolling out alongside today’s public launch.

The magic of Tuition.io is that it allows borrowers to manage all of their various student loans, public or private, in one place and then provides simple solutions for understanding and optimizing their repayment. The platform allows users to create customized action plans geared towards reducing on monthly payments or paying loans down faster. In the future, the company will likely offer solutions like debt consolidation and refinancing from trusted third-parties that will both broaden its value proposition and represent a significant revenue opportunity.

Student loans are one of the biggest fiscal clouds hanging over the US today, with more than 37 million people in the country holding more than $1 trillion of education debt – exceeding both credit card and automotive debt. The fact that each of these borrowers typically has multiple loans from different lenders and service providers – not to mention the fact that loans are regularly sold between lenders – only further complicates matters.

For example, Tuition.io co-founder and CEO, and Columbia University alum Brendon McQueen graduated with 12 separate loans totaling $120,000 and quickly realized that manually managing these obligations was a nightmare. Like many great entrepreneurs, he created Tuition.io to scratch his own itch.

In conjunction with its public launch, the company has partnered with Student Veterans of America and OurTime.org to bring awareness of its solution to underserved groups of young Americans. Co-founder and COO Steve Pomerantz, formerly of Maker Studios, indicated that the company is actively working on several other high profile strategic partnerships of this nature which will help raise its profile among young college graduates.

Tuition.io has not yet announced financing publicly, but the company’s AngelList page lists Abhas Gupta of Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) as an investor in the company. [Update: Gupta confirmed after posting that MDV Partner Bryan Stolle led an investment by the firm in Tuition.io, but could not offer any other details.] With that in mind, expect an announcement in this regard in the near future. The five person team will likely grow to 10 in the first half of 2013, according to its founders, as the company ramps toward what they predict will be “substantial revenue” in the third and fourth quarters of the year.

Given that many are calling the student loan mess the “next mortgage crisis,” there’s no shortage of borrowers and other constituents looking for solutions. The Tuition.io is good, but the company will have to over come a number of daunting obstacles, not the least of them obscurity and general concerns over privacy and online fraud. The fact that the small company must do so with limited resources and that its founders are new to the financial services sector makes success anything but a sure bet. For what it’s worth, personal finance juggernaut Mint.com overcame similar challenges in its early days on just $1 million in Seed financing. McQueen and Pomerantz will hope to pull off the same trick.

Many have already taken to calling Tuition.io the “Mint for student loans.” After more people get a chance to use the service, most will probably just call it a lifesaver.

Michael Carney is a West Coast Editor at PandoDaily, covering venture capital, financial technologies, ecommerce, on-demand services, and the future of television, among other subjects. He has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an entrepreneur and early-stage investor, working in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. He is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter @mcarney.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]